Some blacks find roots not easy to dig up

March 04, 2007|By Kayce T. Ataiyero, a Tribune staff reporter.

The recent revelation that an ancestor of civil rights activist Al Sharpton was owned by relatives of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, a noted segregationist, has thrust African-American genealogical research into the spotlight.

Sharpton's news came on the heels of the PBS special "Oprah's Roots," which traced the talk-show host's lineage to Liberia. And it was followed by disclosures that Sen. Barack Obama's mother's ancestors apparently owned slaves.

All this has left people thinking it is easy for blacks to research their family history and has lent some urgency to their efforts to do so.

But for every Oprah there is someone such as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist friend of mine in Portland, Ore., who ended up disappointed after searching to find out where her people had come from.

Nikole told me last year that she was planning to send a sample of her DNA to a company called African Ancestry to trace her roots. I didn't really understand why. I've never had a desire to delve into my family's past. I have a reasonable understanding of where my people came from. My father is Nigerian, so I have a clear link to Africa--a connection most black people don't have.

Growing up, I had a clear cultural identity. There were parties with men in traditional agbada suits and women in iborun, or shawls, with shimmering gele, or head ties. Our house was always filled with banter in Yoruba and the aroma of pepper soup. For three years we lived in Ilesha, a town my great-grandfather ruled from 1901 to 1920.

Nikole never had that. The closest she had been able to come was tracing her family to an ancestor born into slavery in Virginia in 1723. She wanted--needed--more.

"I think for most of us, our identity is intertwined with our past," she said. "And with so many black people, not being able to trace ourselves outside of slavery is a difficult thing for us to deal with."

Niyi Coker, professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Missouri--St. Louis, compared Nikole's experience to that of an adopted child yearning for connections to her biological parents. For African-Americans, he said, the unanswered questions about heritage are just as bewildering.

"For 400 years, to have no clue as to your name, culture, heritage, where you came from--how could you not search?" Coker said. "You need to find out who you are, just to get that fulfillment, even if it is just for a day, a second."

For Nikole, the feeling of fulfillment lasted just a week.

The results she got back from African Ancestry, which is regarded as having the world's largest database of African DNA, said she shared genes with the Hausa and Tikar people in Cameroon. In the two months it took to get her test results, Nikole had done her own research and discovered the chances of getting a definitive result were slim. At the same time, she found something she hadn't had before: hope. And she wasn't ready to give it up.

She spent her week telling her parents, friends, co-workers--everybody--that she was from Cameroon. She researched everything she could about the Hausa and the Tikar. She even researched how much it would cost to travel to her homeland.

Then she sent her DNA results to geneticist Bert Ely of the African-American DNA Roots Project at the University of South Carolina. Ely told her that, in his opinion, African Ancestry had made a guess based on probability and that her ancestor could have come from virtually any ethnic group in West or West-Central Africa.

"They basically confirmed I was black," Nikole said.

Testing a black person's mitochondrial DNA will yield a result similar to Nikole's about half of the time, Ely said. A match to a single ethnic group is likely only 5 percent of the time.

Tracing a black person's DNA to Africa is complicated by a variety of factors, Ely said. Migration patterns, for example, make it difficult to discern a person's exact origin within a tribe or ethnic group. So just because they match Nikole's DNA to someone in Cameroon doesn't mean her ancestors came from there.

African Ancestry President Gina Paige said Ely's findings are based on a DNA database too small to provide definitive results. Her company's sample size--25,000--and the fact that donors say they are indigenous to their area make her confident that the results are accurate, she said.

"We give you the present-day country with whom you share a common ancestry," Paige said. "For African-Americans, having a connection to a specific place, whether it is today based on a relatively recent time period or whether it is sometime before, we are looking for a connection that we can latch onto that is rooted in science. We are answering the question of where my family was before the trans-Atlantic slave trade."

Megan Smolenyak, Ancestry.com's chief family historian and lead researcher on Sharpton's lineage, has written a book on using DNA to research genealogy. She said the effectiveness of such analysis is "a mixed bag."